The paper examines the motivations, financing, expansion and challenges of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI was initially designed to address China’s overcapacity and promote economic growth in both China and in countries along the “Belt” and “Road” through infrastructure investment and industrial capacity cooperation. It took into account China’s strategic transition in its opening-up policy and foreign policy to pay more attention to the neighboring countries in Southeast Asia and Central and West Asia when facing greater strategic pressure from the United States in East Asia and the Pacific region. More themes have been added to the initiative’s original framework since its inception in 2013, including the vision of the BRI as China’s major solution to improve international economic cooperation and practice to build a “community of shared future for mankind”, and the idea of the Green Silk Road and the Digital Silk Road. Chinese state-owned enterprises and policy and commercial banks have dominated investment and financing for BRI projects, which explains the root of the problems and risks facing the initiative, such as unsustainable debt, non-transparency, corruption and low economic efficiency. Measures taken by China to tackle these problems, for example, mitigating the debt distress and improving debt sustainability, are unlikely to make a big difference anytime soon due to the tenacity of China’s long-held state-driven investment model.

In this policy insight, the author lays out the context of the BRI and its role in global development. He also explains why the US should consider working with China on the BRI. The author opines on China’s possible approach and strategy to get global private investors to come on board for the massive BRI projects. He suggests that the global players can establish a third-party market cooperation and coordination mechanism to turn the BRI into a platform for win-win global collaboration.

Cross-border infrastructure projects offer significant economic and social benefits for the Asia-Pacific region. If the required investment of $8 trillion in pan-Asian connectivity was made in the region’s infrastructure during 2010–2020, the total net income gains for developing Asia could reach about $12.98 trillion (in 2008 US dollars) during 2010–2020 and beyond, of which more than $4.43 trillion would be gained during 2010–2020 and nearly $8.55 trillion after 2020. Indeed, infrastructure connectivity helps improve regional productivity and competitiveness by facilitating the movement of goods, services and human resources, producing economies of scale, promoting trade and foreign direct investments, creating new business opportunities, stimulating inclusive industrialization and narrowing development gaps between communities, countries or sub-regions. Unfortunately, due to limited financing, progress in the development of cross-border infrastructure in the region is low.

This paper examines the key challenges faced in financing cross-border projects and discusses the roles that different stakeholders—national governments, state-owned enterprises, private sector, regional entities, development financing institutions (DFIs), affected people and civil society organizations—can play in facilitating the development of cross-border infrastructure in the region. In particular, this paper highlights the major risks that deter private sector investments and FDIs and provides recommendations to address these risks.

COVID-19 and the economic response have amplified and changed the nature of development challenges in fundamental ways. Global development cooperation should adapt accordingly. This paper lays out the urgency for new methods of development cooperation that can deliver resource transfers at scale, oriented to addressing climate change and with transparency and better governance. It looks at what is actually happening to major donor countries’ development cooperation programs and where the principal gaps lie, and offers some thoughts on how to move forward, notwithstanding the clear geopolitical rivalries that are evident.
The most immediate challenge is to provide a level of liquidity support to countries ravaged by the global economic downturn. Many developing countries will see double-digit declines in GDP, with some recording downturns not seen in peacetime. Alongside the short-term challenge of recovery, COVID-19 has laid bare longer-term trends that have pointed for some time to the lack of sustainability—environmental, social, and governance—in the way economic development was occurring in many places, including in advanced economies. This new landscape has significant implications for development cooperation in terms of scale, development/climate co-benefits, and transparency and accountability.

The implementation of the "the Belt and Road" requires the common development of the "five links" of policies, facilities, trade, finance and popular support, among which "people to people connectivity" is the premise of the coordinated promotion of the "five links", and cultural communication, exchange and cooperation are the foundation and guarantee of the popular support project. The "the Belt and Road" cultural communication, exchange and cooperation are diverse in content and form. We need to identify the opportunities and challenges we face, make long-term strategic plans, and take practical countermeasures and implementation paths according to the characteristics of cultural communication diversity. Some domestic scholars have conducted research on cultural communication strategies and analyzed the opportunities and challenges they face, but there is a lack of diversity analysis on the forms of communication that should be adopted. This paper explores and studies the "the Belt and Road" cultural communication strategy, implementation path and safeguard measures, constructs a new model of diversified cultural communication and exchange cooperation, and tries to play a certain role in promoting the actual effect of cultural communication and exchange cooperation and better safeguarding the "the Belt and Road" community of interests.